Joliet City Manager Tom Thanas met with federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials last week in Washington, D.C. to discuss a possible immigrant detention center in the Will County city. For more than a year, the village of Crete has worked with ICE on a detention center, but the town's village board torpedoed the plan in June. ICE, though, has made it clear that they would like to build a detention center in the Chicago area.

Immigration groups such as the Illinois Coalition on Immigrant and Refugee Rights have opposed such detention centers in part because a for-profit operator would likely run the facility. The Correction Corp. of America in Tennessee was set to run the Crete center. The company has said they would like to work with ICE on a new Chicago-area location.